Calculator information
Our calculators may ask for information such as ZIP code, electricity use, bill amount, roof assumptions, vehicle mileage, proposal pricing or a street address. Core tools are designed to work without creating an account. Unless a feature explicitly says that information will be saved, calculator inputs are used to produce the requested result and are not presented as a permanent user profile.
PDF solar quote analysis and comparison
If you upload a proposal PDF to Quote Analyzer v3, or two to three proposal PDFs to Quote Compare, each file is processed for that request to extract selectable text and identify likely proposal fields. The extraction endpoint does not add the PDF, the full extracted document text or the detected fields to the Real Solar Prices database.
The current PDF workflow limits each upload to 10 MB and reads up to the first 30 pages of each proposal. It returns only detected proposal fields, confidence labels, diagnostics and review warnings rather than the full document text. Text extraction can be wrong, so every detected value should be checked against the original proposal before it is used for analysis or comparison.
Image-only and scanned PDFs are not currently sent to an OCR service by this workflow. Those proposals require manual entry unless a separate OCR feature is explicitly introduced and documented later.
Quote Compare processes each selected PDF through the same extraction endpoint used by Quote Analyzer. Side-by-side comparison values exist in the browser for the active page session and are not automatically submitted to the Real Solar Prices database.
Because PDF parsing uses materially more server resources than a normal calculator request, the extraction endpoint applies a short-lived abuse-protection rate limit. When a proxy-provided client IP is available, the application converts it to a process-local salted SHA-256 key for the temporary in-memory counter. The raw address is not added to the Real Solar Prices quote dataset or returned in the PDF-analysis response.
First-party solar quote matching requests
If you use the Request Local Solar Quote Matching form, Home Solar Atlas stores the information you submit so we can understand and follow up on your request. Current fields include ZIP code, verified state, email address, optional phone number and first name, electric-bill range, project timing, battery interest, property status, contact preference and the page where the request originated.
The initial quote-matching form is first-party. Submitting it does not authorize Home Solar Atlas to sell, transfer or send your email address or phone number to solar installers. Home Solar Atlas may internally identify approved installer candidates, but your contact details stay with Home Solar Atlas unless you later provide separate installer-specific permission.
The phone field is optional. If you choose email-only contact, Home Solar Atlas does not require a phone number. If you choose phone or email-or-phone contact, a valid phone number is required for that preference.
We store consent evidence with the request, including the consent-version identifier, a SHA-256 hash of the disclosure text and the consent timestamp. This helps us document what the form said when the request was submitted. The lead form also uses a short-lived process-local abuse-protection counter based on a salted hash of a proxy-provided client IP when available. The raw IP is not stored in the solar lead table.
To reduce accidental duplicates, a new request using the same email address and ZIP code within 24 hours may be treated as the same recent request rather than creating a second lead record.
Authorized Home Solar Atlas staff can review first-party matching requests through a protected administration tool and classify them as new, contacted, qualified, closed or deleted. Private follow-up notes may be stored with the lead record. Access uses a separate server-side administration secret and is not part of public site navigation.
Installer-specific consent and secure lead delivery
After a Home Solar Atlas lead is qualified, our private administration tool may identify approved installer candidates based on service state, battery capability and selected verification signals. This internal matching step does not send the homeowner's contact information to an installer.
Before contact details can be delivered to an installer, Home Solar Atlas creates a separate consent request for one named company. The homeowner consent page identifies that installer and explains the sharing scope. Email sharing is expressly authorized for that specific installer, and a homeowner who previously supplied a phone number may separately choose whether the phone number is included. Consent for one installer does not authorize sharing with another installer.
We store an audit record for installer-specific consent, including the lead and installer identifiers, a snapshot of the installer name and website, consent version, SHA-256 hash of the consent disclosure, consent-link expiration, decision status, sharing scope and relevant timestamps. Consent links use a random bearer token; only a SHA-256 hash of that token is stored in the database.
The private token is carried in the URL fragment after the # character. Browsers do not send that fragment as part of the normal page request. Client code moves the token into session storage for the active browser tab, removes the fragment from the visible address bar and sends the token only in the body of a private API request.
After consent is recorded, authorized Home Solar Atlas staff may create a separate short-lived delivery link for the approved installer. The delivery link exposes only the contact fields authorized by the homeowner together with basic project information needed to respond to the request. Only a hash of the delivery token is stored in the database. The system records when the authorized lead is first accessed, and the delivery link expires automatically.
Consent and delivery pages are marked noindex and nofollow, are excluded from Home Solar Atlas Google Tag Manager loading, and use a no-referrer policy. They should still be treated as confidential bearer links: anyone who obtains an active link may be able to use the access it grants until the link expires or is revoked.
Home Solar Atlas staff can revoke a pending consent, an authorized delivery before first access, or further access after an installer has already viewed the lead. Revocation cannot make an installer forget information it already viewed, but it prevents the private Home Solar Atlas delivery link from returning that lead again. A homeowner may also contact us to request review or deletion of their quote-matching record. We do not treat installer-specific consent as a purchase obligation or as permission to share the homeowner with unrelated companies.
Installer partner applications
If a solar company applies through the For Installers page, Home Solar Atlas stores the business and authorized-contact information supplied for application review. Current fields can include trading and legal company names, website, business contact name, email and phone, headquarters and service states, years in business, licensing references, insurance confirmation, NABCEP status or reference, review-profile URL, battery and financing capabilities, installation capacity and service-territory notes.
Application submission does not automatically create a public profile, verified badge, paid placement or access to homeowner leads. Home Solar Atlas may review public licensing, accreditation, review and company information before changing an application from pending to reviewing, approved or rejected.
Authorized staff can store private verification notes with an installer application. Partner applications are protected by a separate server-side administration secret from homeowner lead and Real Solar Prices moderation tools.
We store the installer application's consent-version identifier, a SHA-256 hash of the business-contact disclosure and the consent timestamp. The public application endpoint also uses a short-lived salted-hash abuse counter when proxy IP information is available; the raw IP is not stored in the installer application table.
Installer application analytics are designed not to send business email addresses or phone numbers to the analytics data layer. Current events use non-contact fields such as headquarters state, number of service states, NABCEP status and whether battery or financing services are offered.
Anonymized solar quote submissions
If you separately choose to submit a quote to the Real Solar Prices database, we store the fields you provide, such as ZIP code, state, system size, solar-only cash price, battery price, financing type, annual production, equipment model, optional installer company and quote date. We do not require your name, email or street address for this contribution.
ZIP code and the more detailed submitted values are kept internally for moderation, market validation and duplicate detection. ZIP codes are not displayed in public quote examples. The current duplicate check compares a limited quote fingerprint, such as location, system size, price, financing, installer and quote date, against recent submissions so an accidentally repeated quote does not count twice. This check does not require a public user account.
Review before publication
New Real Solar Prices quote submissions are stored as pending and are not included in public statistics until reviewed. Authorized Home Solar Atlas reviewers can approve, reject or return a submission to pending status through a protected moderation tool.
We do not publish state statistics or individual quote examples until at least three approved submissions are available for that state. More granular price slices use higher minimum sample thresholds as described in the Real Solar Prices methodology.
What appears publicly
Public Real Solar Prices quote examples are intentionally less precise than the stored moderation record. The current public display uses state rather than ZIP code, shows only the quote month and year rather than the exact day, rounds the displayed solar cash price to the nearest $100, and rounds annual production to the nearest 100 kWh. Public examples do not show a homeowner name, email, phone number or street address because those fields are not required by the quote submission form.
Approved submissions may be used in aggregate statistics such as quote count, median solar-only dollars per watt, percentile ranges, average values, system size and privacy-protected market segments. The submission form asks for consent before the quote is stored for this purpose.
First-party quote-matching contact details are not published as part of Real Solar Prices or installer directory pages. Installer application business-contact details also are not automatically published merely because an application was submitted or approved for further review.
External data services
Some features send the minimum necessary query information to external data providers. ZIP and solar-production tools may use National Laboratory of the Rockies PVWatts, OpenEI and postal-location services. Address roof analysis may send the address or derived coordinates to Google Maps Platform Geocoding API and Solar API. Installer discovery may send a ZIP code, city or area to Google Maps Platform Places API.
Google Maps Platform use is also subject to Google's privacy practices. See Google Privacy Policy.
Google Maps Platform content
Place results provided by Google Maps are displayed as live discovery results and are visually identified as Google Maps content. We do not treat those live place results as our own verified installer database.
Technical, analytics and security data
Our hosting and infrastructure providers may process standard server information needed to operate and protect the site, such as IP address, request time, browser information, error logs and security events. We may use aggregated site-performance or analytics information to improve the service.
Lead-form analytics are designed not to send email addresses, phone numbers or ZIP codes to the analytics data layer. Current events use non-identifying workflow fields such as project timing, battery interest, contact preference, homeowner status and verified state code after a successful submission.
Cookies and future account features
If advertising, saved reports, user accounts or additional analytics features are added, this policy will be updated to describe the data collected, purpose, retention and available choices before those features are relied upon for personal-data processing.
Corrections and deletion
External solar, utility, incentive and place data can change. We are building correction and deletion processes for user-submitted Real Solar Prices records and verified business profiles as those datasets expand.
You may contact Home Solar Atlas to request review or deletion of a first-party quote-matching lead associated with your email address, or to request review of an installer partner application submitted by your company. We do not currently promise a fixed retention period for lead, consent, partner-application or quote records, and this policy will be updated if a formal retention schedule is adopted.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as Home Solar Atlas adds new features, data providers, matching partners or legal requirements. The current revision date is shown at the top of this page.